North American Archaeology

Post-Clovis Settling In

Major trends after Clovis

• Increasing population
• Increasing emphasis on bison hunting
• Increasing diversity of material culture

The Dalton Horizon

Dalton points and knives are found all over the Southeast from Missouri to  NC to Georgia

• Usual occurrence is with Archaic
• Once thought to be transitional from fluted point tradition to Archaic, but sealed levels dated from 10,500 to 9,900 BP, pure Dalton suggest that it is contemporary to Folsom on the Plains
• Not lanceolate in shape, but combines lanceolate and triangular
  • From a concave base the sides are nearly straight about 1/3 of the length, then sharply triangular
  • Edges may be beveled-- some suggest resharpened Clovis
• Found with a variety of scrapers
• Most well-known site is Rodgers Rock Shelter in Missouri, but relatively recent find is the Little Salt Spring in west-central Florida, not conclusively Dalton, but of the same age

Little Salt Spring

Unique, puzzling, and improbable

A sinkhole more than 175 feet deep, with a surface basin that slopes steeply to an opening that expands it into an hourglass shape

About 40 feet down is a ledge, just before it goes down to lower area. Used when water level was low

• On the ledge was a giant land turtle shell killed by putting a stick between the shells, then roasted--dated 13, 450 BP, with stick at 12,000 BP, and hearth at 12,100 BP
• Also evidence of ground sloth, bison, immature mammoth
• Around lip of the sink was a series of stakes driven into the sediment, with hearths higher up on the rim--hunting tactic of driving the animals in or keeping them there when they were watering?

Folsom Culture

Much more well known, as the first point type unquestionably found with extinct Pleistocene fauna

Just slightly later  than western Clovis

Characterized by small projectile points with long, slender fluting scars running almost the full length of the point, and "ears"

After flute is removed, the edges are delicately retouched, ground or dulled near the base

Lindenmeier Site

Just south of Wyoming border in Colorado

Interesting because it is a campsite as well as a kill site, excavated in both the 1930s and 1970s--Wilmsen's work in the 1970s even suggests that kinship group may be "visible" in techniques of stone tool manufacture

C14 date of 10,800 BP

Stone tools

• Whole and broken Folsom points associated with Bison antiquus
• One mammoth tusk recovered, but most bones were bison, with some extinct camel and deer
• A variety of scrapers, including well-made end or "thumbnail"  and side scrapers
• Gravers also common, usually a small flake with a tiny sharp point for engraving wood or bone
• Knives are broad, thin pieces with parallel sides and retouched edges, but nothing like the skill involved in making the points
• Crude ax-shaped choppers
• Small hematite chunks for pigment, grooved sandstone abraders/whetstones
• Flat stones for palettes, hammer stones

Also three or four eyed bone needles and an engraved bone disc (gaming piece or ornament)

Lifeways

Not a duplicate of Clovis

• The cul-de-sac kill site technique was new
  Bison are nearly blind, and follow a leader as herd animals
• A surround, with the animals finished off in the end of a gully
• Would require some level of cooperative or communal hunting which suggest some some level of social organization rather more complex - some one or groups to control behavior
• Broadened set of procedures for hunting

Western Desert Sites

Important to mention that fluted points have been found all over the desert West

Utah, California, Nevada, Oregon, but surface finds near the edges of beachlines on old Pleistocene lakes

Little known of them, but may be ancestral to the Desert Tradition groups of the Archaic

Plano Cultures

In the east, Paleoindian more or less ends with Dalton and related finds, but on the Plains we  find an expansion, with chipped stone tool technology proliferating as populations expand
-- Fluting technology disappears
-- Plano is a catch-all

Numerous sites, often with point types named after them

More variation in the graceful lanceolate shape, with ratios of length to width averaging about 3.5:1, but with 2:1-5:1 range.

Lack of fluting is probably the diagnostic trait; later types have narrow bases and pronounced shoulders
--some like Cascade-Lerma have no base and are double-pointed

Table below is an estimate of approximate dates and types from  Jesse Jennings' Prehistory of North America, 3rd ed., 1989-- there are more types!

Approximate Chronology of Major Plains Projectile Points

Style variations do not indicate a major shift in life styles --concentration of the kill technique did not change

--there is even greater variation as in dunes, surrounds, drives

And, it may be more complex than realized; for example, at the Levi Site in Texas, there were several hundred flint specimens, including 32 from the Plano tradition with Angostura, Dalton, Plainview, Cascade-Lerma points. There were also fifteen scraper types, three classes of microburins (engravers), knives, five cobbles used as manos, a slab milling stone and an antler or bone rod, a wide range of animal bones (including rodents, rabbits, deer and bison, as well as carnivores, horse and tapir**dates range from 10,000 BP-7,400 BP

An important new hunting technique

Fall or jump, becomes a classic technique, probably a variation of the cul-de-sac

Depends on coordination of a sizable group of people, close and skilled direction and advanced planning

Key idea is to direct a small herd of bison toward a precipice or arroyo to force animals over the edge--key is to stampede the animals toward the edge where they can't turn back

Decoys lead animals into a V-shaped trap with people behind stone cairns or piles of brush

Involved men, women and children as drivers.

Olsen-Chubbuck Site in east central Colorado, excavated by Joe Ben Wheat is a classic

10,200 BP

A long, 3 meter wide gully, two meters deep

About 190 animals were injured or killed in the trap. Butchering began immediately with more than 60 tools found-Firstview points, cobbles for breaking bones, flint knives and scrapers

Bones were piled in order by heaps indicating that the butchery process was consistent, efficient and rapid

1. After skinning, and removal of hump meat,
2. Forelegs and shoulder girdle were cut free, the meat removed, and bones discarded on forelegs (little meat).
3. In the scrap heap the hind legs were above the pelvic bones.
4. Next on the heap were vertebral columns with skulls attached
5. Animals deep in the gully show little evidence of being butchered, the bones found almost fully articulated

Wheat's report is a classic, with everything from probable wind direction to total meat produced

O-C is one of many such sites: Vore with its nearly 30 feet deep pile of bones, Casper with its parabolic dune, Head-Smashed-In in Alberta with a jump used from Plano times to the historic

Settlement and Social Structure

Picture of a single focus subsistence pattern is misleading

A variety of vegetal material and small game are evident in some sites as are some processing tools

Evidence points to small bands of people who moved in cyclical, planned sequences from resource to resource -- as Fagan says, perhaps practicing optimal foraging

There are other than kill/butchering sites, including quarries (Knife River in ND as example), flint-knapping sites, hunting-stands, camps

For latter, we may have evidence of living floors, maybe structures with hard packed surfaces with flint debitage at edges, and hearths central as at the Debert and Hanson sites.

Base camp sites always seem to be near water: springs, arroyos, streams

Water source, but also where game would be abundant, almost always with a downwind overview

Basic conclusions of social structure:

• two or three patrilocal families
• seasonal range from resource to resource would be less than 100 miles
• range was fully familiar territory
• many families came together for communal hunts
• task force personnel was flexible (some might hunt, others might go to flint source)
• social structure was egalitarian

The central view is that the Paleoindian people were settling in to the environments of local areas, a process that continues into the Archaic.

Main source: Jesse Jennings, 1989, Prehistory of North America, p. 81-113

| Main | Outline| Announcements | Lecture Notes | Video Guides | Additional Materials | Links |

larry-zimmerman@uiowa.edu
University of Iowa Anthropology
08.20.98